Posts for: June, 2013

Prolonged sitting at work, in the car, or at home, isn’t limited to causing low back pain.

In the 05/25/13 edition of the Los Angeles Times, Anup Kanodia, a doctor / researcher at the Center for Personalized Health Care located at Ohio State University's Wexner Medical Center stated, "Sitting is the new smoking."

According to the study, which compared sitting and smoking, each hour of TV that people watched while sitting, decreases lifespan by about 22 minutes. And in the study it was estimated that smokers shorten their lifespan by about 11 minutes per cigarette.

So if you think about, sitting down to watch TV while smoking can be pretty unhealthy.

I mean like watching a horror movie unhealthy, where you want to shout at the screen. “Don’t sit in that chair, it will kill you! No!!! Don’t light up that cigarette! It means certain death! I can’t watch...he’s going for the bag of Doritos! Tell me when it’s over.

Temperature, blood pressure, pulse, weight, and cholesterol are all important. They are things that have been measured over time and compared to many other people. And from these comparisons averages are obtained.

And while averages might be helpful, they allow doctors to run the risk of treating you as a mechanism and without intelligence.

For example, a standard wristwatch is mechanistic and without intelligence. If you cross into a different time zone, it does not know how to adapt and tell you the right time.

So elevated blood pressure, high cholesterol, a fever, chronic back pain, or weight gain are really not in themselves diagnoses or even the health problems. They are signals that the body is adapting to something.

And while the adaptation may not be healthy, such symptoms open the door for detective work as to what is really occurring in that individuals diet, lifestyle, or environment.

Think about it.

How should you treat a diagnosis such as high blood pressure? Like the body was a dumb loaf of bread and needs a medication to drive it down?

Or should your recognize the body is elevating the blood pressure for a reason. That something deeper is going on in that person’s health and life that the innate intelligence of the body is responding to in the best way that it can. The raised blood pressure is just a symptom, not the cause.

If you acknowledge the body is intelligent, it is easy to become more interested in the person than just their symptoms.

Recently, a conversation I had with one of my chiropractic patient’s lead her to become one of my function medicinepatients.

The topic of the conversation was so typical to what I see in the clinic, I decided to post the meat and potatoes of the topic.

Actually, potatoes are too high in crabs and too low in vitamins for this post, so let’s try meat and something nutrient dense / much more tasty…kale!

The conversation began with my patient whom I will call Lisa for this post, worrying that she has become more forgetful in recent months. Things like her keys, what did I come into this room for, forgetting the grocery list at home, those types of things.

While this might not worry most people and tends to be typical behavior for many of us who are frazzled with work and children; she was concerned. First, it was something she normally did not do and second, her mother had a history of senile dementia. Lisa was worried her recent forgetfulness might be a sign of things to come.

But if you looked closer a Lisa you would also notice that she becoming overweight, exercised on and off but not consistently, and in recent months had been feeling mildly depressed. She blamed her depression on feeling tired and she felt her fatigue began about a year before after starting a cholesterol lowering medication.

When I asked Lisa what her definition of eating “well” was, she offered up the standard American diet (or SAD diet). Even better, she skipped breakfast, drank coffee with an artificial sweetener instead, and “ate a lot of fruit” for lunch.

Following this brief discussion, I knew immediately what Lisa needed in order to improve her health and avoid all of these symptoms that were threatening to become a full blown diagnosis of a chronic condition with little attached CPT codes for the insurance companies.

While we ultimately worked on several things that would jump start her health, I want to focus right now one of the biggest myths she was holding onto: that cholesterol was bad.

I know, obviously taking a medication that lowers your cholesterol as low as possible makes you physician happy, but what about your brain? And do you really like taking that pill every day?

Here is an interesting factoid, your brain is largely made up of cholesterol, as is the myelin sheaths, which insulate nerve cells, and the synapses that transmit nerve impulses. Some research studies theorize that lowering cholesterol may lead to a slowing down of connections involved with thought and memory. Furthermore, the statin drugs might also lead to the formation of abnormal proteins seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.

In fact, neurobiologists in recent studies have discovered that a molecule derived from cholesterol sends a signal to stem cells. And that signal caused the cells to become dopamine producing neurons.

Why is this important?

Because dopamine is very important with regard to cognition, your memory, your mood, sleeping, and even voluntary movement (low dopamine is involved in Parkinson’s disease).

In Lisa’s case it was easy to connect the dots: normal memory > years of “eating well” which led to cholesterol lowering medications > poor memory.

So guess what happened to Lisa. She stopped “eating well”, her energy returned as did her memory, she felt like exercising, the weight came off, and with all those lifestyle choices in place, no longer needs cholesterol lowering medication!

According to some interesting research, the mineral ZINC may play a significant role in memory and learning. Researchers, by using a chelator that specifically binds with zinc and eliminates it from the brain of the test animals, found that communications between neurons was significantly diminished and that zinc is vital for controlling the efficiency between nerve cells in the area of the brain called the hippocampus.

In fact, the highest concentrations of brain zinc are found among the neurons of the hippocampus that control the high functions of learning and memory.